Glorious People by Sasha Salzmann and Imogen Taylor

Author:Sasha Salzmann and Imogen Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Published: 2024-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

The next morning Lena suggested going to her mother’s grave. ‘Let’s go and see Mum.’

Her father vanished into the bathroom to get shaved. He also gave his hands a good wash; Lena could tell from his red fingertips. He must have tried to scrub the forest filth from under his nails—filth far older than the previous day’s outing.

The cemetery had grown; Rita’s grave was no longer at the edge. Lena filled a bucket at the trough and poured water over the stone slab to clean it of dust and leaves. Then her father laid the chrysanthemums they’d bought on the way on the gleaming surface. Margarita Andreyevna Platonova, it said. Born… Died… Nothing else. The engraved letters sloped slightly, like a handwriting exercise, but they were plain, without flourish.

Out of the corner of her eye, Lena saw people placing small stones instead of flowers on the next grave along. There were about four or five of them, all dressed in black, murmuring to each other and nodding. A very small child clinging to its mother’s skirts waved at Lena with its free hand. Or at least it stuck its arm in the air.

I probably look as pale as them, Lena thought. Though it’s almost the end of summer.

The Technical Museum, which they passed on their way back, was closed. They bought vanilla ice cream and sat in dappled shade on a bench in the park. Lena tilted her nose to the sun; the light glinted through the leaves. A little colour in her face wouldn’t be a bad idea; she didn’t want to arrive in the West looking like death warmed up. Music was coming from somewhere, a tune no one played any more—or was it in her head? Probably one of Okudzhava’s old hits. Lena pulled her thin coat tighter around her, and her father started to talk about age. He had the impression, he said, that age wasn’t measured in years, but by the speed at which you grasped things: the older you were, the quicker you understood what was going on in the world around you, and the quicker you could react and cope. Seen like that, he said, he was young, because he didn’t understand a thing of what was going on—but before Lena could say anything, he’d changed the subject again.

‘Will you take the washing machine?’ he asked, holding out his empty ice-cream tub to her.

‘Malyutka?’ she said, looking around for a bin. ‘Of course. I wouldn’t leave a good friend behind.’

They set off along an avenue of oaks. The first leaves were falling on the path, but the treetops were still lush and strangely loud, as if the leaves were slapping against each other. Lena slipped her arm through her father’s and tried to start a conversation with him, but he was already somewhere else, perhaps deep in the woods, and only made vague sounds of agreement, even when she hadn’t asked anything.

Lena told herself she would come back regularly to visit him—maybe every few months, circumstances permitting.

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